The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus

Aeschylus, John Stuart Blackie

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783849648299
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

Aeschylus was one of the most famous ancient Greek tragedians He is often called "the father of tragedy", since this genre really begins with his works. This edition includes the following dramas: Agamemnon Choephoræ Or, The Libation-Bearers The Eumenides Prometheus Bound The Suppliants The Seven Against Thebes The Persians

THE PERSIANS
A HISTORICAL CANTATA

“Why should calamity be full of words?

Windy attorneys to their client woes,

Airy succeeders of intestate joys,

Poor breathing orators of miseries!

Let them have scope; though what they do in part

Help nothing else, yet they do ease the heart.”

Shakespere.

Ὥ θείη Σαλαμὶς . ἀπολεɩ̂ς δὲ σὺ τέκνα γυναικωˆν.

Delphic Oracle

PERSONS

Chorus of Persian Elders.

Atossa, Mother of Xerxes.

Messenger.

Shade of Darius, Father of Xerxes.

Xerxes, King of Persia.

Scene—Before the Palace at Susa. Tomb of Darius in the background.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

The piece, on the perusal of which the reader is now about to enter, stands unique among the extant remains of the ancient drama, as drawing its materials from the historical, not the mythological, age of the Greek people. We are not, from this fact, to conclude that the Greeks, or the ancients generally, drew a more strict boundary line between the provinces of history and poetry, than the moderns. Such an inference were the very reverse of the fact, as the whole style of ancient history on the one hand, and the examples of Ennius and Lucan in poetry, sufficiently show. Not even within the special domain of the Greek stage is our one extant example the only historical drama of which the records of Hellenic literature have preserved the memory; on the contrary, one of the old arguments of the present play expressly testifies that Phrynichus, a contemporary of Æschylus, had written a play on the same subject; and we know, from other sources, that the same dramatist had exhibited on the stage, with the most powerful effect, the capture of the city of Miletus, which took place only a few years before the battle of Marathon. ^{Endnote 188} There was a plain reason, however, why, with all this, historical subjects should, in the general case, have been excluded from the range of the Greek dramatic poetry; and that reason was, the religious character which, as we have previously shown, belonged so essentially to the tragic exhibitions of the Hellenes. That religious character necessarily directed the eye of the tragic poet to those ages in the history of his country, when the gods held more familiar and open converse with men, and to those exploits which were performed by Jove-descended heroes in olden time, under the express sanction, and with the special inspiration, of Heaven. Had a characteristically Christian drama arisen, at an early period, out of the festal celebrations of the Church, the sacred poets of such a drama would, in the same way, have confined themselves to strictly scriptural themes, or to themes belonging to the earlier and more venerable traditions of the Church.

With regard to the subject of the present drama, there can be no doubt that, like the fall of Napoleon at Moscow, Leipzig, and Waterloo, in these latter days, so in ancient history there is no event more suited for the purposes of poetry than the expedition of Xerxes into Greece There is “a beginning, a middle, and an end,” in this story, which might satisfy the critical demands of the sternest Aristotle; a moral also, than which no sermon ever preached from Greek stage or Christian pulpit is better calculated to tame the foolish pride, and to purify the turbid passions of humanity. In ancient and modern times, accordingly, from Chœrilus to Glover, the whole, or part of this subject has been treated, as its importance seemed to demand, epically; ^{Endnote 189} but of all the poetical glorifications of this high theme, that of Æschylus has alone succeeded in asserting for its...